3 May 2006 in Windows | Comments (1)

Since the most popular page on my site is the entry about the Consolas font, it’s nice to now post that you can download the Consolas font

Download: Click here to download Consolas

Supposedly only for people using Visual Studio 2006… whatever that is!

– JD

3 May 2006 in Business | Comments (4)

Telecom will be unbundled – government announcement.

News Story Here: Telecom to be unbundled

Anyone want to take a bet on how far Telecom slides down the sharemarket tomorrow morning? $5.55 at close today.

- JD

3 May 2006 in Business | Comments (3)

As a follow on from Tim’s recent post I thought I’d post an entry about ZoomIn.co.nz (and their Australian Map site) to help get some Google love for them. Ben is the Technical Director of Project X Technology Ltd and spoke at code camp recently about Rails (he managed to get a few laughs too – always good ).

I’ve been really impressed with what has been happening in Wellington in the last 18 months. We’ve had some great software companies pop up (Aftermail), some great sales (TradeMe, Aftermail. Existing IT businesses have been growing strongly. Some of the IT high fliers have moved here and the buzz is building.

Having ZoomIn starting up is also great to see – one of our first Web 2.0 companies. Ben is positively bouncing off the walls to try and get people to start more Web businesses as well.

Considering the popularity of the business session at Code Camp it seems that lots of people have ideas they’d like to turn into businesses. Perhaps an IT entrepreneurs (and those interested in becoming one) user group type thing would be a good idea? Certainly we’ve got the interest – the challenge would be ensuring that people actually take some action to launch businesses so it didn’t become stale. The networking potential would be fantastic in itself.

On the networking front, does anyone have some good suggestions on events to attend?

Thoughts?

– JD

1 May 2006 in .Net | Comments (2)

Finally getting around to my code camp post

All in all I really enjoyed code camp – there were some really good speakers, good topics and the environment was quite comfortable. Prizes were also more substantial than I had anticipated (which is why I didn’t win any!).

It was also fantastic to be able to meet, albeit briefly, some of the people who blog regularly in the .net space. Finally met Tim Haines (I have no idea why but I’d always imagined you as having a pony tail – blame it on being from the south island!) – very friendly and easy to talk to.

Also met Alex of Base4 fame. He was also quite approachable and friendly – still not seeing a blog up yet but he is posting articles on the Base4 Solutions website I had to leave before seeing his session which was unfortunate as I’m quite interested in data storage in general.

Caught up with Mauricio from GeekZone.co.nz. He was part of the fantastic after lunch panel on developing a software business. I really enjoyed this session – Rod, Chris and Mauricio all had slightly different views on various topics which kept things interesting. I haven’t spoken to anybody who didn’t find this session fantastic. The after lunch panel the previous day was also great – more sessions like this next year would be cool

So would I go again? You betcha.

– JD

27 April 2006 in General | Comments (4)

There is plenty of chatter about Live.com and how it [sucks|rocks] from various NZ .Net bloggers.

I’ll stay away from the discussion other than to say I like that they’re trying new things – it’s better than nothing. Now, what I would like to see is the general experience being more like NetVibes. Again, trawling through my statistics I found I’ve had several hundred hits from http://www.netvibes.com

In terms of portals (which I don’t personally love) it’s pretty cool. The multiple tabs (drag the widgets onto them), the fact I can name the page what I want etc – it all seems a lot smoother than Live.com.

Anyway, that’s all I really wanted to say for now Like everyone else I’ll try and get my post Code Camp review out soon.

– JD

26 April 2006 in Windows | Comments (2)

Finally Microsoft have released a copy of Internet Explorer 7.0 that runs on Windows
2003 without hacks Officially this is Beta 2.

I installed it last night and had no problems with it wrecking my networking stack – looked good. Integration between Office 2007 and IE 7 seems to already be baked in (Outlook asked if I wanted to have IE and Outlook share the same RSS feeds).

Click here to download Internet Explorer 7.0

– JD

23 April 2006 in .Net | Comments (0)

One of the questions that was raised at Code Camp was “what is the version of Visual Studio after Orcas called?”

Around the middle of 2005 it was announced that the version after Orcas would be called “Hawaii”. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if this turns out to be wrong or it gets changed but there seems to be considerably discussion about that name floating around.

EWeek Article: “Hawaii”: A visual studio paradise for developers?

- JD

P.S. Microsoft really have got us all hanging out for the leading edge haven’t they? It seems people don’t care about the next best thing – but the next next best thing

20 April 2006 in Blogging | Comments (4)

I was reviewing my referral information for my blog today and noticed a few hits from a website called TechTalkBlogs.

The site looks like a pretty clean and after looking under the “Australian Bloggers” I found that they are consuming my feed and allowing people to rate them. Based on the other users on the list that somebody has borrowed Nic’s fantastic NZ .Net Bloggers OPML and imported it into this site.

I couldn’t find out much about the intention of the website (other than to syndicate sites) but it’s an official Microsoft site.

I always love seeing my blog being pimped on the internet

- JD